Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/198

150 three times greater (in breadth and height), and he was soon able to make telescopes which in the same way magnified thirty-fold.

That the new instrument might be applied to celestial as well as to terrestrial objects was a fairly obvious idea, which was acted on almost at once by the English mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), by Simon Marius (1570–1624) in Germany, and by Galilei. That the credit of first using the telescope for astronomical purposes is almost invariably attributed to Galilei, though his first observations were in all probability slightly later in date than those of Harriot and Marius, is to a great extent justified by the persistent way in which he examined object after object, whenever there seemed any reasonable prospect of results following, by the energy and acuteness with which he followed up each clue, by the independence of mind with which he interpreted his observations, and above all by the insight with which he realised their astronomical importance.

119. His first series of telescopic discoveries were published early in 1610 in a little book called Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger. His first observations at once threw a flood of light on the nature of our nearest celestial neighbour, the moon. It was commonly believed that the moon, like the other celestial bodies, was perfectly smooth and spherical, and the cause of the familiar dark markings on the surface was quite unknown.

Galilei discovered at once a number of smaller markings, both bright and dark (fig. 53), and recognised many of the latter as shadows of lunar mountains cast by the sun; and further identified bright spots seen near the boundary of the illuminated and dark portions of the moon as mountain-tops just catching the light of the rising or setting sun, while the surrounding lunar area was still in darkness. Moreover, with characteristic ingenuity and love of precision, he calculated from observations of this nature the height of some of the more conspicuous lunar